George Marshall

George Catlett Marshall Jr. (31 December 1880-16 October 1959) was the US Army Chief of Staff from 1 September 1939 to 18 November 1945, US Secretary of State from 21 January 1947 to 20 January 1949, and Secretary of Defense from 21 September 1950 to 12 September 1951. Marshall was the chief military adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, and he was the mastermind of the anti-communist Marshall Plan after the war's end.

Biography
George Marshall was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania on 31 December 1880 to a middle-class family that had roots in Virginia. He was a distant relative of Chief Justice John Marshall, and he graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1901. Marshall was a company commander during the Philippine-American War, and he returned to the United States in 1916 to serve as the aide-de-camp to Major-General J. Franklin Bell. In mid-1917, he was sent to France as the director of training and planning for the US 1st Infantry Division, planning their victory at Cantigny as well as the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Marshall entered the War Department as a key planner and writer during the Interwar Years, and he was promoted to Brigadier-General in October 1936. On 1 September 1939, he was promoted to full general to succeed Malin Craig as the new Chief of Staff of the US Army.

Marshall inherited a poorly-equipped army of 189,000 troops upon being promoted, so he coordinated the large-scale expansion and modernization of the US Army. He was responsible for picking several generals to lead the army, including George S. Patton, Omar Bradley, Mark W. Clark, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jacob L. Devers, Terry Allen, Lloyd Fredendall, and Leslie McNair, and he planned a 90-division army that could fight overseas. On 16 December 1944, he was the first five-star American general and the second five-star American commander (a day after William Leahy became fleet admiral), and he coordianted Allied operations in Europe and the Pacific.

After the war's end, Marshall was sent to China to negotiate the creation of a coalition government between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China. He threatened to withdraw vital aid to the Nationalists if Chiang did not accept the deal, but he had no leverage over the communists, and the CPC would ultimately take over the country at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In 1947, he became Secretary of State, and he opposed the government's recognition of Israel, as he feared that a war would break out when Israel declared independence - Israel's Arab neighbors invaded Israel that same day. Marshall was then made Secretary of Defense in 1950, and he had General Douglas MacArthur relieved for insubordination. In September 1951, Marshall retired to his home in Leesburg, Virginia, and he died in DC in 1959 at the age of 78.